Saturday, April 25, 2015

Spring Week 1: Active Learning

This quarter, the Graduate
Teaching Community decided to shift weekly discussions to a journal-club
format, in which we read and discuss a peer-reviewed paper relating to college
teaching each week. Our topic this week was active learning and the discussion
was based on a review, “Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research”
(1). While the review is now a decade old, it is worth reading, as it presumes
limited familiarity with education research on the part of the audience, making
it more accessible to non-specialists. Our discussion of the paper had two main
phases – we talked about overall challenges in interpreting educational studies
and then went over active learning, collaborative learning, and problem based
learning.

Challenges in interpreting the educational literature

The biggest pitfall facing
non-specialists reading the education literature is probably the temptation to
over-generalize results. To avoid this, it is important to carefully assess
both the teaching methodology used and the measured outputs. The importance of
this is evident when looking at the active learning literature – a wide range
of techniques fall under the banner of active learning and researchers have
assessed their impact on everything from test scores to student attrition to
attitudes towards school.

Active learning

Active learning can be broadly
defined as any student-centric activity that is incorporated into a traditional
lecture that has the effect of breaking up the passive transmission of
information from teacher to student. Examples include giving students a minute
to review notes with a neighbor, “think-pair-share,” i-clickers, and group
problem-solving. These approaches are thought to beneficial because they serve
to reset student attention spans and, if done well, help students engage more
deeply with the material. While many studies have shown benefits from active
learning, the wide variety of approaches that fall under this umbrella mean
that you should look for technique-specific studies before making a decision
about implementing a particular flavor of active learning.

Cooperative and Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning methods
are approaches where students work in groups, either in class, or outside of
class. Cooperative learning is a specific type of collaborative learning, where
students are graded based on both group and individual performance. An example
of cooperative learning could be a group presentation where students work
together to prepare the talk and are then graded, a least in part, on their
individual performances. Both approaches have been shown to improve grades,
reduce attrition, and improve student attitudes. An important consideration
with group work is that many students have never been taught how to work
effectively in groups, so be sure to provide guidance on how you want the
groups to function.

Problem-based learning (PBL)

Problem-based learning
encompasses a wide-variety of approaches where learning activities, lessons, or
entire courses are designed around solving a real-world problem. Examples of
PBL could include an ecology lecture that introduces concepts through the prism
of a conservation problem at a particular park, an accounting assignment that
teaches tax concepts via working through a tax return, or a molecular biology
lab course where students spend the semester cloning and characterizing a
particular gene. Due to the wide array of PBL methods, the data on their
efficacy is somewhat mixed, however the most consistent finding is that student
attitudes towards the course are better when PBL is used.

Based on our discussion, it is
clear that active learning approaches are something that all college teachers
should consider incorporating into their classes. Indeed, efforts to expand use
of active learning in large lecture courses are underway at UC Davis (2). If
you want to read more about the research on active
learning that has been done since this review was published, I recommend taking
a look at recent meta-analysis of over 200 active learning studies (3).

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome to the GTC!

The aim of this group is to provide a space for graduate students and post-docs on the UC Davis campus to feel supported in our efforts to become better teachers. This is a place to discuss teaching and learning philosophy and practice. We meet with the purpose of creating opportunities for collaborative interdisciplinary professional development in a community setting.

Fall 2017Meeting Time: Wednesdays, 12:10 - 1 pm

Location: Surge III (The Grove), Room 1310B

Questions? Want to get on the GTC list-serve? Contact this year's GTC facilitator: